Sunday workshop, January 21st.

During lockdown I wrote '21 Mottos for working with watercolour'. In this workshop we'll be looking at Motto 3 'Watercolour is a medium of shape and not line'. We'll dive straight into the first watercolour, no sketching, no pencils, it's called 'The mug in layers'

When you draw a line, you mark a boundary to indicate where two areas come together. They look different enough in tone or texture for you to think ‘Oh I’ll draw a line there to show that’. In fact, no line exists at that meeting place. As your teacher I’ll ask you…’which side of that line is darker?’ That is the side where you will put your paint, making sure that the edge of your painted area has the edge which represents the line you have drawn. Below is the process I followed to paint the coffee mug.

1.       Painting the coffee mug - I make an initial wash of a pale yellow and fill a rectangular area with this colour except for the shapes I choose to leave white. I leave the rim of the cup white and the area inside the handle of the mug white. Being very careful about where I do not put the paint, I put my paint everywhere else. I lift two highlights on the cup handle, one on the top and one on the bottom.

2.       Once the first layer is fully dry, I paint the coffee within the mug and the shadow cast on the mug as one shape (layer two) while also being careful to leave the shine on the coffee’s surface light (un-painted with layer two).

3.       I take up more paint (more layer two) and paint the whole outside of the coffee cup shape, plus its shadow so that they run together as one shape. I soften the edges of the shadow but not the edges of the cup. I am careful not to paint over the ‘lifted’ highlights on the cup handle. I make the outside of the cup a slightly different colour from the colour inside the cup. This is possible because the outside and the inside of the coffee cup never run together – they are separated by the white ellipse.

4.       When layer two is fully dry, I paint the darker area of coffee inside the cup – this separates the shadow from the coffee’s surface and creates the ellipse of the coffee in the cup. I’m careful to leave the shine on the coffee and to ‘reveal’ a little more of the light. This gives the shine two tones. I paint some darker tone on the outside of the cup, making sure to reiterate the hard edges of the cup’s sides but softening the paint’s edges within that shape. Some of this paint runs into the shadow area. I find the dark tones on the cup handle leaving a few more places light. When the base of the cup is 100% dry, I put the darker shadow in making sure to get the edge exactly right to separate the mug from its shadow and affirm the lower edge of the cup.